One way to model how the imperial state functions is to think of it as a single informal community that controls the organs of power. People enter into this community as they would any community. They get to know people, make friends, build connections and over time are considered a part of the community. Every once in a while, one of them falls out of favor and is punished by the community. They are “on the outs” for a while until they can be rehabilitated and returned to good standing.

It is not a formal structure with rules and official membership, like the communist party in Russia was back in the last century. That was an effort to create something where no natural community existed. Instead, Washington is the natural evolution of the managerial class that evolved in the 20th century. People move to the area through one of the many on-ramps of the managerial state. Over time, they slowly become part of the ruling community that controls the imperial government.

It is why reform is impossible. There’s nothing all that wrong with the formal government, at least in terms of structure. The issue is the people running it. For them, the organs of government are there to serve the community, not the country. That’s why they are always finding ways around the rules, subverting the process and manipulating the system in order to achieve ends different from what is intended. For them, the point of government is to serve the community, not the country.

Even though the community is not a formal organization, it has some similarities to the old communist party system. Instead of party officials enjoying special perks like cars and secret access, community members have unofficial perks. For example, the community members involved in the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election will be exempt from prosecution. That was the point of the IG report, to let the world know the community has looked into the matter and the issue is closed.

If there is any doubt about this, consider the people at the heart of the scandal, who cooked up the fake intelligence dossier. They are so sure of their position, they are now running a new operation to plant community stories in the media. If these people had any fear of Barr or Durham, they would be lying low. Instead, they are doing the same service for the community they were doing before all this. They are members of the community in good standing. They have nothing to fear.

Like the old communist party, community members live with one another in lavish quarters in the capital. Instead of apartments on the Embankment, the community lives in swank neighborhoods in the city. The lower ranking community members live in seven figure homes in the surrounding suburbs. For example, Lois Lerner, the women who used the IRS to harass dirt people in the 2012 election, lived in this lovely home in Bethesda. She now lives on the Vineyard, by the way.

It is this community nature of the ruling class that makes it immune to democratic reform and popular pressure. When reformers are elected and sent to Washington, they are absorbed into the community. As Pat Buchanan pointed out decades ago, reformers arrive in the capital and go native within a few years. The reason is they join the community and soon see their interests as the community interest. Those who don’t are eventually framed or shamed out of office and expelled.

This is why Trump’s game of chicken with the Democrats over impeachment will end in disaster for the country. He thinks they lack the spine to remove him, but they are not interested in removing him, at least not yet. Instead, the community has decided to use him to further the interest of the community. When impeachment hits the Senate, Trump will be given a list of things he must sign in order to avoid conviction. Look for immigration reform to be at the top of that list demands.

Immigration is a good way to understand the psychology of the community. They want to pass reform, by which they mean open borders, not for material gain or because they are ideologues. They want the issue to go away. The most expedition way of doing that is to give the pirates what they want. This is how health care reform worked. The pirates got what they wanted and the issue was put to bed. Your health care is worse, but you are not part of the community, so you don’t matter.

Trump could roll the dice and dare them to convict, but that’s not much of a threat to the community. A few members of Congress will lose their seats, but they will not lose their place in the community. Instead they will land in high paying lobbying jobs elsewhere in the system. That was the lesson of health care. The inner party lost the House in the 2010 election, but all of the defeated members landed in good jobs at good wages in the imperial system. The community still thrived.

It is why reform, particularly democratic reform, is hopeless. You cannot reform something that does not exist in a formal sense. The ruling elite in Washington is a subculture financed by global pirates. The billionaires underwrite the community and the community makes sure the global pirates get what they need from the state. In many cases, the billionaires are members of the community. George Soros and Paul Singer are as much a part of the community as anyone.

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One of the defining features of the managerial class is how it uses rhetoric to shape the debate in order to eliminate the need for debate. They are not in the habit of debating their ideas and fads, mostly because they don’t want to debate those things. It is a soft-authoritarianism where they seek to shame and cajole their opposition out of the public square, so they don’t have to debate them. A good example of this is a piece on the debate between young activists and the racketeers.

The author of the piece is an editor of First Things, a publication that used to bill itself as a conservative religious journal aimed at “advancing a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.” As in the case of Buckley conservatism, establishment Christian organization set as their goal to fit themselves into the Progressive moral order. As a result, First Things is a thoroughly house-trained operation that offers no threat to the prevailing moral order.

Putting that aside, it is a great example of how the establishment, broadly defined here to include all the subgroups on the other side of the great divide, first seeks to shape the debate so as to exclude those seeking to debate them. In this case, the writer has no interest in addressing the actual core of the fight between the groypers and the racketeers of Conservative Inc. Instead, he claims the debate is between white nationalists and classical liberals over the issue of free speech.

There is a word for what he is doing here. It’s called lying. For starters, there is no definition of “white nationalist” that includes Nick Fuentes that would not also include the founders of Buckley conservatism or the Founders of the United States. If that is what the author intends, then he is the extreme radical here, claiming that the very founding of the nation is immoral. After all, the term “white nationalist” is currently defined to mean immoral, as in a heretic or blasphemer.

Calling Charlie Kirk and the other racketeers of Conservative Inc. “classical liberals” is a revealing bit of rhetoric. Within living memory, Buckley conservatives would have avoided such a description. Religious conservatives certainly would not have used the term positively. Up until the last generation or so, no right-winger would claim that society is no more than the sum of its individual members. After all, the Buckleyites called themselves Burkeans, not Hobbesians.

Once he redefines the sides in the dispute, he then gratuitously characterizes the nature of the dispute. On the one hand, he claims the sides disagree on Israel and homosexuality. On the other hand, he claims both sides agree on the value of free speech and debate. At best, this is a superficial analysis that suggests the author is unfamiliar with both sides of this battle. At worst it is an effort to frame the issue in such a way as to make it easy to defend Conservative Inc.

The claim is that Nick Fuentes is the bad guy, a white nationalist, who is not a real Christian, while Kirk is just a secular libertarian. The reason the “white nationalists” are attacking the classical liberal is Kirk foolishly embraced free speech. The writer spends the rest of his post on a rant about the dangers of white nationalism, a rant that is part of the stock rhetoric of the Left. In other words, in typical Progressive style, it’s all about the good guys and bad guys, the white hats and black hats.

Of course, you never debate the bad guys. To do so, as the Left always reminds us, is to legitimize them. Giving white nationalists a platform could lead people to think that their claims have legitimacy. In order to avoid that, the bad guys must be destroyed, which in this case means anathematized as social pariahs. Mr. Schmitz is doing exactly what dissidents have been accusing Conservative Inc. of doing for generations now, acting as a gate-keeper for the establishment.

To be more accurate, they are not just gate-keepers in a passive sense. That’s another lie they like to promote, as if they are just defending the status quo. In reality, so-called conservatives like Mr. Schmitz are skirmishers, running ahead of the main battle line in the culture war. In this case, the job is to anathematize the critics, so they can be more easily dismissed by the main army of the Left. The whole setup of the post is as a vehicle for pointing and shrieking at the dissidents.

It is rather ironic that the groyper’s actual complaint, the real dispute between them and the racketeers, is exactly what Schmitz is doing in this post. It is not a dispute over speech or individual liberty. Those things play an ancillary role, but they are not the primary issues. The issue is that allegedly conservative outfits like First Things have conserved nothing but their position within the Progressive establishment. They spend all of their time defending their alleged adversaries.

That is why Conservative Inc. has embraced left-wing rhetoric to defend itself against the dissidents. They have no choice. They cannot defend their behavior morally and they cannot defend their record. Like common street walkers, conservatives have been willing to jump into whatever car pulls up to the curb. In order to avoid admitting this, they have to shift the focus from themselves onto some bad guy. After many long years getting into lefty’s car, they have taken on his habits.

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Everyone raised in the Unites States over the last fifty years has been required to memorize the official dogma regarding Jim Crow laws. These were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. The official version preached to this day is that they were draconian restrictions on blacks preventing them from having a normal life. Modern blacks are told that their condition is the direct result of white discrimination against blacks via these laws.

Now, there is a debate as to the intent and the effect of these laws, mostly because the Left has re-imagined that period in American history. The official version of the Civil Rights era is a fantasy with little connection to reality. What is not under dispute is that these laws existed and they had a negative impact on blacks. Black institutions did not receive public support. Blacks were denied access to the legal system, which often denied them justice when the victims of white malfeasance.

The best argument against these sorts of laws is that they created a second class of citizens, as a legal construct. You cannot have democracy if you have second class citizens, as democracy assumes all men being equal before the law. If the effect of Jim Crow was separate and equal, then maybe they would fit into democracy. In reality, they were separate and unequal, even accounting for the differences in the races. Therefore, as a legal construct, they violated the ideal of equality before the law.

While not always written into the legal code, certainly not explicitly, the Jim Snow laws are just as offensive to the ideal of equality before the law. The evolving legal construct under which whites are treated different from non-whites is a variation of what existed in the South during segregation. While the intent of Jim Crow was to keep the races separate, the intent of the Jim Snow laws is vengeance. It is part of the blood libel against white people in America.

The most recent example is the firing of hockey coach Bill Peters after allegations of racist remarks made by the coach came to light. Peters admitted to using the magic word when addressing a black player ten years ago. Why a Nigerian was in Canada playing hockey is never explained, but Peters admitted to the crime. He was first required to publicly grovel for his crime. He posted an open letter apologizing for blaspheming a black, then he was fired and forever banished from hockey.

Now, his behavior may be unprofessional, but coaches have never been known for being polite or sensitive to the feelings of their players. Even so, the crime happened a decade ago. There’s no evidence this is an ongoing thing. Maybe there is a case to me made that he should apologize to the black guy, but only a lunatic nurses a grudge for a decade over mean words. Instead, it is assumed he is a racist, because all whites are racist. This just proves it. Therefore, he must be banished.

This type of situation could never happen with a black. For starters, blacks use the magic word in their everyday speech. Good whites break into reverent tears whenever they hear a famous black utter the incantation. It’s like a magic spell. Further, non-whites are free to rage against whites without restriction. The New York Times hired Sarah Jeung because she hates white people. Michelle Goldberg has a prominent position on the pages of the Times, because she hates white people.

This double standard does not stop with the war of words. Blacks are now allowed to murder whites if they can claim the white was racist. In the case of Michael White, who murdered a white man in cold blood, the assumption of racism was enough to give him a pass. The N-word pass has become so embedded in the culture that every black accused of wrong doing claims he was reacting the use of the magic word by the white person he attacked. This is the latest example.

The default assumption of the Jim Snow laws is that whites are relentlessly racist and always motivated to harm non-whites. Therefore, whites are required to prove they are not acting on racial bias. In the case of Curtis Flowers, this claim is now going to the Supreme Court. No one doubts he killed these people in cold blood. The issue is that whites cannot be trusted to render the verdict. After all, it assumed they are so racist, they cannot be trusted to convict a black killer.

The heart the Jim Snow laws is a blood libel. Whites are guilty by the virtue of being descended from whites. They have inherited their guilt. The fact that this assumption is at odds with reality is immaterial. The people in charge of the culture hate white people, so the Jim Snow laws are enforced. In the case of Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman, they were sent to prison for the crime of being white. They are in jail, having been denied the basic legal right to face their accuser.

The main differences between the Jim Crow laws and the new Jim Snow laws is the intent of the laws and the temperament of the people enforcing them. It has been forgotten, but most blacks were fine with segregation. Jim Crow was about preserving two distinct cultures in the same place. Jim Snow is about wiping out white culture and the white people defending it. Unlike the defenders of Jim Crow, the Jim Snow proponents will never relent. Their vengeful hatred will never permit it.

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Not so long ago, societal collapse was a big topic of conversation among critics of the current world order. Usually it was centered on economics, as the financial system has become so complex that no one can explain it. The run-up to the mortgage crisis had lots of people promoting economic collapse theories. A decade earlier, the Y2K panic ushered in theories of technological collapse. Of course, the zombie apocalypse movies and TV shows are a regular part of the pop media rotation.

Societal collapse, however, is probably not in the cards. The best known treatment of the issue is by Joseph Tainter. In Collapse of Complex Societies, Tainter makes the point that collapse in the modern age is unlikely, as all complex societies are dependent on one another. Therefore, when one society begins to fail, the rest will provide support to prevent the rapid disintegration of the failing society. In other words, the modern age is a network of reciprocal relationships between complex societies.

In the case of America, the rest of the world needs America in order to remain intact, so a crisis in America will be met with a response from Europe, Asia and even South America. The internal response to crisis will include global support for repairing the internal problems of America. This network of relationships may not arrest the decline, but it will prevent collapse. The rest of the complex societies will ease America into the autumn of its existence, thus buying themselves time to adjust.

An alternative to this analysis comes from John Michael Greer. He wrote a paper on what he termed catabolic collapse. The general theory is that all human societies create complex institutions and social structures that require maintenance. Over time, the cost of maintaining them begins to exceed capacity. The solution is a deliberate downsizing where these complex systems are abandoned in order to focus resources on the core functions of society. Complex societies don’t collapse. They downsize.

Greer’s idea is a variation of the Tainter theory, in that it focuses on the material aspects of society. In the Tainter view, collapse is like bankruptcy that ends in a liquidation of the society. Greer’s view is a bankruptcy that leads to a reorganization of society going through bankruptcy, so it can reemerge simpler and more viable. In reality, both ideas are working from the same assumption. That is, human societies grow inefficient over time and that inefficiency eventually reaches a tipping point.

One issue that is a problem when discussing these theories of societal collapse is we tend to think of collapse as something that happens relatively quickly. That is, it happens not just in our lifetime, but overnight. One day things are going along just fine and the next day the wheels are coming off the cart. It is the image of Rome at its peak compared to the image of hairy barbarians scaling the walls. We naturally want to think of collapse as the sudden, unexpected death of society.

Collapse is most likely experienced in fits and starts, with those fits and starts spanning lifetimes. For example, the men who founded the American empire in the early 20th century passed out of this world seeing their creation in the throes of the cultural revolution of the 60’s and 70’s. The so-called greatest generation that inherited the empire from the founders, were re-engineering American society so their rotten kids would stop rioting in the street and burning the college campus.

The generation that founded the empire probably thought it was headed for collapse, but by that point they were too old to care. It did not collapse. American society stabilized, regained its footing and started to recover in the 1980’s and 1990’s, with the great economic and technological boom. Ironically, the baby boomers are experiencing what their grandparents experienced as they head for the void. They are seeing what appears to be the collapse of American society in a spasm of multicultural rage.

A half century ago, California was the epicenter of the cultural revolution that threatened to collapse society. It is the test bed for the multicultural favela the rage heads in the ruling class have planned for the nation. Today, they have rolling blackouts in a third world effort to keep from setting the state on fire. Their efforts to manage air pollution, a great crusade in the 1860’s and 1970’s, is beginning to fail. Their pension system is effectively bankrupt, just waiting to collapse in the next decade.

In other words, the spasm of decline and near collapse of a half century ago was part of a cycle of decline. This crisis will probably be followed by some correction, where things settle for a while, but never return to the prior normal. Just as the 1980’s never reached the level of social accomplishment of the post-war years, the next period of tranquility will fall far short of the 1980’s and 1990’s. It will simply be an interregnum between one period of crisis and the next, another step down the ladder of collapse.

At some point, the old social capital of the prior greatness is exhausted. The Romans were a spent people for over century before the collapse. In fact, they were arguably done in the third century. The real question about the late Roman Empire is how it managed to stagger on for so long. That may be where we are now in present day America. The next step down the ladder of decline may be so unstable that the weight of past error crashed society through to the bottom.

The case for this theory of collapse is the rapidly shrinking white middle-class. It’s not just shrinking as an economic institution, but as a cultural one. The dominant culture today is one that celebrates degeneracy and barbarism. Bourgeois culture remains, but unlike the 1980’s, it is not front and center, offering a stabilizing point to arrest the cultural turmoil of the day. The antidote to what’s happening today is not a man in a sundress demanding the rest of us pretend he is a girl.

In addition to the shrinking influence of bourgeois white culture, there is the growing sense that what’s left of America is not worth saving. Everyday, more and more white people come to the conclusion that the people they see in politics, the media and popular culture are incompatible with the world they want for themselves and their decedents. That old bourgeois white culture is looking at America like the family exhausted by an alcoholic relative. It’s time to cut our losses.

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One of the great challenges of the demographic age will be re-conditioning people to think culturally, rather than materially. This is particularly true of conservative white people, who have been trained their whole lives to define their existence by the amount of stuff their heirs will throw away when they die. Theirs is an entirely materialist existence, so the transition to cultural thinking is going to be difficult. An example of this is in this post by Steve Sailer regarding public venues.

He starts with the observation that the ancients built a lot of very sturdy stone theaters and arenas, while those who came immediately after the fall of Rome did not built anything of significance. It was not until the Middle Ages that we see the building of large public structures, but those were cathedrals and churches. He notes that it took until modernity to build large public arenas. Sailer then jumps to the conclusion that the Greeks and Romans must have a lot of money relative to the Middle Ages.

Now, it certainly required a great deal of money to hire men to build amphitheaters and arenas in the ancient world. Reallocating thousands of people from farming and military service can only be done by a wealthy society. The early medieval period in Europe was not a time of great prosperity. Wealth is not enough, however. Those theaters and arenas were not just the toys of rich people. They were not built by rich people, at least not in the way in which our sports arenas are built today.

In fact, the more apt comparison is between the arenas and theaters of the ancient world and the cathedrals and churches of the Middle Ages. The theaters built by the Greeks were an important part of their cultural life. The plays and festivals reinforced the cultural values that made Greek life possible. The arenas built by the Romans were not just for sport. They also had strong cultural importance. The reenactment of great battles tied the Roman to his past and to his ancestors.

For most modern white people, Sailer’s instincts on this seem natural. After all, we live in an age without any sense of culture, other than the endless war on what is left of white culture by the brown tide sweeping the land. For most Americans, the point of life has been to stuff their pockets with as much stuff as they can. The measure of life is your pile of stuff. The super-successful at getting stuff build really large buldings where you can buy stuff, like sports jerseys to remember buying stuff.

It is a good example of how the white people who came along after the Second World War became entirely materialistic in their thinking. This is not a Baby Boomer issue, but more about the legacy of their parents. That cohort went through the Great Depression and then the privations of the war. In the ensuing boom times of the early days of the empire, they justifiably enjoyed the fruits of their labor. It was a golden age, relative what came before, so they quickly learned to value material prosperity.

The so-called greatest generation gets credit for weathering the grinding depression, without embracing communism. They get credit for fighting two industrial wars on two continents, winning both and ushering in the Pax Americana. They also should get credit, and blame, for ushering in the material age, where all things are measured in material terms. The generation that built the American empire, also built a society in which everyone knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

It has become a meme to mock the Baby Boomers for their obsession with stuff, but it is a society-wide phenomenon. Modern America functions like a ghetto riot, in which the culture is a liquor store. Everyone is just smashing and grabbing what they can, not because they need it or want it, but because that’s what they do. This is particularly true with conservatives. All of their arguments, particularly those that fall into the cultural and spiritual, have been reduced to economic appeals.

In the long scope of things, the American empire will be seen as an entirely artificial construct, built on the wreckage of Western civilization. The two great industrial wars that opened the 20th century exhausted the people spiritually. This includes the people who claimed to have saved the West. The cultural achievements of the American empire, such as they are, reflect that lack of spirit. The American empire and the culture around it is a lifeless zombie shuffling through time and space.

A simple way of seeing this is the fact that Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood and the center of American popular culture, has a homeless camp in the center. Estimates say it contains 70,000 of our fellow citizens. Yet, the super-rich who run the city are not concerned in the least. After all, they have their stuff. Even the most callous of Roman emperor had compassion for the poor of Rome. The modern American oligarch has nothing but contempt for those who cannot consume product.

The current ructions are not a response to the changing demographics as the suicidal wreckers like to claim. It’s not about the transition to a post-national order. The reason for the growing unhappiness is that modern American society offers no purpose, no beauty and no reason to celebrate life. It’s an ugly age with a sterile ascetic that reflects the transactional nature of the age. This is an unnatural state for people, so the people are increasingly unhappy with life in the material age.

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The youthful rebellion against establishment gate keepers on the college campus has mostly confirmed what has always been understood about the front men hired to be the face of these operations. Never having to answer tough questions allows them to fool people, especially young people, about their motives. The questions young people are posing these guys are not all that tough, but when posed to hot house flowers not used to push-back, the result have been devastating.

The main take-away thus far is that Charlie Kirk is the political equivalent of a lip-syncing pop star. In narrowly staged performances, as long as the sound track works perfectly and the lights are just right, Kirk can put on a good show. When he has to rely on his own talent to carry the show, the results are comically poor. He was recently booed off the stage at his UCLA event. Like that lip-syncing pop star, who gets exposed during a stage mishap, Kirk’s career is now a laughingstock.

Kirk, of course, is not the only fraudster to get the business from the groypers, as it has now become the cool thing to do. Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire, who is always a skipped pill away from a shooting spree, had to be sedated after getting some tough questions from college boys. The cynical con-man Dan Crenshaw has responded by threatening to ruin the lives of these kids. It appears that Pirate Dan is trying to prove that honorable military service is independent of good character.

The most interesting result thus far has been the meltdown by Ben Shapiro last week, which was so bad he had to pull it from his YouTube channel. The comments were full of young people mocking him. Shapiro is probably the smartest of the con-men deployed by Conservative Inc., but he is also the most thin-skinned. Any push-back is met with a childish tantrum. Like Charlie Kirk, it suggests he is a hothouse flower, carefully protected by his handlers, in order to maintain the charade.

If you pay attention to his act, what comes through is he has a deep, subconscious hatred of white people. Take for example his promotion of the dubious claim that European civilization is defined by Judeo-Christian tradition. For most of Western history, Christianity and Judaism were at odds. In the early medieval period, Jews and Christians competed for converts. When the term Judeo-Christian came into use in the 17th and 18th century, it was as a Pauline pejorative against Catholicism.

Putting aside the history, what he is doing is rewriting the European past in order to make it dependent on his religious and ethnic traditions. You can have your Christianity, as long as it is accepting of Jews, which neuters the theologically. You can also have your Western chauvinism, as long as you make sure Jews are central characters in the narrative. Ben Shapiro’s view of Western civilization is colonial, as if he is allowing white people to have some conditional cultural heritage.

This becomes clear when Shapiro says “white civilization is nonsensical.” He says that “civilization is defined by culture, history and philosophy.” He is divorcing what he calls Western civilization from the people who created it. Like his sleight of hand swapping out Catholicism from the heart of European history, he is turning Western civilization into a gift inexplicably granted to the people of Europe. It is not something European people created, but something they received, like hitting the lottery.

There is an obvious implication to this train of thought. If white people are just lucky recipients of civilization, then they are not really deserving of it. This would explain Shapiro’s love for non-white immigration. Why shouldn’t everyone get a taste of this civilization thing? It’s only fair. When he says “he does not give a good damn about the so-called browning of America,” he is not entirely honest. In fact, he really cares, as he is in total support of it as an act of retributive justice.

You can never know what is in someone’s heart and it is entirely possible that Shapiro has not thought through any of this. It is increasingly clear that he is clever, but not a deep thinker. He possesses a vermin-like rapacity that is often mistaken for smart and ambitious in this degraded age. His act is therefore about presenting himself as a smart guy, who just happens to agree with an audience desperate to throw money at anyone showing them some respect. He’s just working the suckers.

Either way, the fact that these guys have no prepared responses to these questions has some larger implications. It is important the keep in mind that the same people bankrolling Shapiro and Kirk and all the rest are also bankrolling versions of these guys on the Left. Both sides of the Progressive morality play are financed by the same amorphous donor class that also underwrites the Imperial Capital. These morality plays are always the product of the Cloud People to control the Dirt People.

This stuff suggests the divide between the Cloud People and Dirt People has grown to a point where neither side really understands the other. The people behind these shows have no idea what’s going on among the hoi polloi. Similarly, the rabble is baffled as to why these people don’t address the questions being raised. Much of the success of this rebellion is due to the groypers assuming their targets were smart and prepared, so they prepared great questions and great logistics.

One thing that is true about revolutions, at least in the West, is that long before the crisis in the streets, there is a quiet divorce between the people and their rulers. The people in charge stop knowing or even respecting the people over whom they rule, while the people lose their connection to their rulers. It is this connection, this set of reciprocal obligations rooted in blood and history that sees a people and their rulers through crisis. Once it is gone, the next crisis becomes a revolution.

When even a guy, who is desperately trying to be the voice of the Dirt People inside the Imperial Capital, is all thumbs on the youth revolt, it says they are flying blind. Gaetz posted his support for the Cloud and hour later he is rushing to qualify that tweet, because his staff noticed the reaction. When the Tribune of the Dirt People instinctively sides with the Cloud People, the gap between us them and them has probably reached a point where it can never be bridged. What comes next is inevitable.

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If you wanted to locate a point on the timeline as to when America began its descent into the current crisis, a good candidate would be when the Right decided to focus on economics over culture. While there is no specific day on which they made the shift, it happened somewhere during the cultural revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s, largely in response to that culture war. When the Right embraced fusionism, the die was cast and events would inevitably lead to the current crisis we see today.

Fusionism was the work of Frank Meyer, a 20th century political thinker, who was one of the founding members of National Review. In the book, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, Meyer sought to unite libertarian ideas with traditionalism, into a new conservative ideology to oppose the Left. Instead of defending culture and tradition on their own terms, the New Right would use libertarian arguments to show that traditional culture was economically superior to socialism.

What happened to the American Right is it embraced the materialism of the Left, but sought to use those arguments to arrive at traditional ends. Rather than reject the hollow materialism of socialism and communism, the New Right would embrace it and celebrate it. Man was no longer a spiritual being operating in a material world, but a narrowly self-interested economic unit, who pursued his subjectively-defined ends in the most efficient way possible. Culture now took a back seat to economics.

Of course, what they were doing, even if they did not understand it at the time, was conceding the culture war to the Left. By shifting from a defense of culture and tradition on their own terms, the Right was no longer going to challenge the moral claims made by the Left. Instead of disputing the morality of Progressive reforms, the Right would put on the green eye shade and explain why those reforms were too expensive or upsetting to the economy. The Right became the accounting department of the Left.

Again, at the time, this probably seemed like a clever strategy. Post-war America was concerned about peace and prosperity. If you wanted political power, thus control of the culture, so the argument went, you had to win the argument over how best to achieve peace and prosperity. A political platform that promised economic growth and a foreign policy that promised peace through strength was the winning ticket. The Reagan Revolution of the 1980’s looked like a proof of concept.

The trouble was this could work as long as the general culture remained intact, ready to simply say no to the latest Progressive innovations. It turned out that 20th century conservatism was a free rider, living off the cultural surplus of post-war society. Like the Left, the New Right consumed this cultural surplus, but never contributed anything back to the cultural stock of society. More important, it allowed to atrophy the tools a people need to defend their culture and traditions from the Left.

By elevating economics over culture, the Right could just as easily justify left-wing assaults on civil society. The destruction of small-town America, for example, is largely a right-wing project. They are the ones defending oligarchical operations like Amazon and Walmart, that convert social capital into profits, draining the life from small town America. As long as it can be justified economically, the Right is happy to see these economic pirates raid your town and your neighborhood.

Think of it this way. For generations, social organizations relied upon local businessmen to underwrite them. The local church relied about its wealthy members to pay for the upkeep of the church and bankroll church activities. Local youth sports leagues were sponsored by local small business. Google is not going to pay for the repairs to the church’s pipe organ. Amazon is not going to sponsor your kid’s ball team. The price of cheap goods from Walmart was the spirit of your community.

This is why the cultural decline is accelerating. In the 1990’s, the mainstream of the Left snickered at homosexual marriage. A generation later and you get fired from your job if you are insufficiently enthusiastic for the guy in accounting, who recently started pretending to be a woman. The political Right has no answer for why this madness is intolerable, as they cannot find an economic argument suggesting it is too expensive or bad for global finance. They don’t know why transvestite story time is wrong.

When it all comes down to money, it means every man has a price. More important, it means his price will be at wherever the cheapest seller is at the moment. That’s been the story of the Buckley Right for the past thirty years. They are always ready to sellout to the lowest bidder, thus the culture war turned into a race to the bottom. The wreckage of Buckley conservatism is the result of a political strategy based on knowing the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

If there is to be a revival of the American Right, it must be a cultural revolution, not an economic one. An authentic alternative not only says Bob from accounting cannot wear a dress, but Bob cannot be in our town, as he is not one of us. We don’t tolerate men who wear dresses, because that’s who we are. An authentic alternative rejects economic man and embraces the whole man, who is defined by is community and his role in that community. Spiritual man must reign over economic man.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!